A Life with Monsters

Abstract

In 1998, as he sat in his office for the last time before he retired, surrounded by plaster casts of Sasquatch footprints and hominid skulls that filled wooden shelves to the ceiling, Grover Krantz pondered his long career. Over the years he had collected hundreds of different animal skulls and the better part of a dozen human skeletons. All of them seemed stuffed into this room like a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. On a table facing him the life-sized reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus skull stared at him with empty, but searching eye sockets, as had his dog Clyde’s skull 25 years before. Had it all been worth it? One of Krantz’s great complaints centered on the accusation that his career in the anthropology department of Washington State University suffered neglect and ridicule because of his work on Sasquatch. Had battling the conventional wisdom of academic scientists and the quirky nature of some of the amateur naturalists provided any tangible results other than disappointment and bitterness? Had someone undermined his career from the outside, or had he contributed to it himself? Had he resolved anything in the battle between the crackpots and the eggheads? Had it been worth living a life with monsters?

Having lost this battle almost totally, I am reluctant… to pursue this line any further.¹

Grover Krantz